Software | Information | Community

October 2011

Software

Azure AppFabric Service Bus Explorer (with code) – Greg Duncan highlights a tool from Paolo Salvatori for examining the contents of an instance of the Windows Azure Service Bus, allowing you to see the information stored in messages. Full Source is available for this useful applet.

VS11DP Microsoft Parallel Visualization Pack – Greg also highlights a nice Visual Studio 11 add-in which brings visualisations to the new Parallel Watch Window giving easier ways to view the data once you get more contexts.

Introducing Managed Bootstrapper Applications – Heath Stewart discusses the new Managed Bootstrapper Application (MBA), a part of the WiX 3.6 release, which you may have seen in use if you have installed the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. Heath discusses its capabilities and how it works under the hood in this first post on the subject.

OpenWrap 2.0.1 – a better way to look at dependencies – Seb Lambla discusses the improved ‘List-Wraps’ command in OpenWrap 2.0.1 which helps make clearer the package dependencies of your projects as a part of his ongoing series of posts on the new features of this major version number release.

Update NuGet Docs in the Browser with Github – Phil Haack discusses how the NuGet Team have moved their documentation repository to GitHub to take advantage of the in browser editing of MarkDown files to help reduce the difficulty of contributing to the documentation effort.

Getting Started with JavaScript…again – Christopher Bennage urges you to embrace JavaScript again now that it has become ‘cool’ again, highlighting some good books, resources and principles to help you along the way.

Lessons From A Review Of JavaScript Code – Addy Osmani discusses the value of Code Reviews for developing your skills, highlighting places that you can get your JavaScript reviewed by other developers, talking about the review process, and looking at some of the things to look for in reviews of JavaScript.

Community

My impressions of #GiveCampUK – Gary Ewan Park shares his experiences of the first UK GiveCamp held little over a week ago in London – sounds like it was a splendid event, and I was very sorry to not be able to be there. Gary also highlights other posts from attendees. Work is already underway to plan next year’s GiveCamp, visit http://www.givecamp.org.uk/StayInformed to stay in the loop.

Software

What’s new in MEF ‘version 2′ Preview 4? – Nick Alok highlights the 4th preview release of MEF ‘Version 2′, with an official release planned for inclusion in the .NET 4.5 release. This post highlights some of the significant new features, looking at the ue of Open Generic Parts, Convention based part registration, composition scoping enhancements, and much more.

Unity 3.0 Preview for .NET 4.5 – Grigori Melnik highlights the 3.0.1026.0 Preview release of Unity which adds support for its use on .NET 4.5 with both WinRT and desktop profiles along with some other improvements.

Windows Phone InfoKit for Public Sector Developers – Joel Reyes has collected together a comprehensive collection of links to help public sector developer get up to speed with Windows Phone Development, also of use to non-public sector devs too – Joel lists the various software components to install, training resources, Blogs and articles, and open data sets you can make use of.

Building a Calculator using WP 7.1(Mango) – Niladri Biswas walks through the building of a simple Windows Phone 7 Calculator application using the Mango tools, working from File > New Project to having a working application

Stop Asserting Arguments by Name – Sean Feldman discusses an annoyance in a number of areas of .NET Development where parameters take the name of an argument as a string. Sean shares a simple code snippet which alows you to get the name as a string yet keep your code strongly typed (and refactor friendly)

Best Practices for Getting Started with SVG – Jennifer Yu shares a nice introduction to the use of SVG graphics in HTML5 applications, looking at the various features of SVG, and how you can interact with it using CSS and JavaScript.

Community

Free OpenWrap workshop, Cambridge, 5th of November – Sebastien Lambla highlights his visit to the Cambridge Developers’ User Group where he will be running an OpenWrap workshop showing how OpenWrap can be used to solve your dependency needs. The event is on Saturday 5th November

Software

OpenWrap 1.0.2 available – Seb Lambla announces an updated version of his OpenWrap package manager for .NET. This update introduces the features necessary to support compatibility with the future 2.0 release

Information

Visual Studio 11 .NET Advances – Somasegar continues his series looking at the features included with Visual Studio 11. This part discusses some of the significant updates to the .NET Framework in the 4.5 release.

Lap Around Roslyn CTP: Syntax Analysis and Flow Analysis – Sasha Goldshtein continues his series of posts looking at the Roslyn CTP release. This part explores the use of Syntax Analysis and Flow Analysis illustrating the use of these techniques to look for ignored method return values ins some code.

Building Visual Studio Extensions with Roslyn – Jonathan Allen is also exploring the use of Roslyn in a series of articles on InfoQ, and in this piece he discusses the various features and providers which enable you to bolt Roslyn powered functionality into Visual Studio, extending the IDE.

Async messaging realities – Jimmy Bogard highlights a short post from Ayende which helps to illustrate one of the key concepts in message based architectures, discussing the concept, and how it can make migrating to message based architectures more difficult.

Using Windows Azure Regions efficiently – Pablo M. Cibraro discusses the notion of Windows Azure regions and how they map to particular data centres around the world, looking at how the choice of where to host affects performance and reliability, discussing the use of the Windows Azure Traffic Manager CTP, the Content Delivery Network and SQL Azure Data Sync.

The Tablet Show – "Resist the Drama" – Dan Wahlin highlights a new podcast series from the chaps behind .NET Rocks (Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell) where they will be discussing all things tablet development, featuring Dan in show #2 discussing WinRT Development.